After 23 years volunteering outside, Alice Dollmeyer has seen some filthy things. The dirtiest thing she remembers handling at SERC is an oyster basket pulled up from the docks. When she first began, the oyster trays didn’t hang but sat on the bottom of the Rhode River, and would often come up covered in black mud.

Since then Dollmeyer has done just about every education job a SERC volunteer can do. She has lead canoe trips, helped children pick up crabs and run all five stations of the Estuary Chesapeake program for visiting schools. She’s also shown up for every docent workday, a day of housekeeping which, as education specialist Jane Holly describes it, “You get your arms as dirty as possible cleaning up everything to get ready for the field season.”

A flounder in a bed of eelgrass. Seagrasses and other underwater plants provide food and shelter to many iconic Bay creatures, including blue crabs. (NOAA)

It’s been a difficult century for the submerged flora of Chesapeake Bay.

In the 1930s, wasting disease nearly wiped out the eelgrasses of the North Atlantic. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, they faced onslaughts from invasive grasses like water chestnut and Eurasian milfoil. Finally, in the summer of 1972, Hurricane Agnes pummeled underwater plants to the lowest levels ever reported in the Bay. This April, they received news that, at first glance, seemed positive: Submerged grasses rose 24 percent between 2012 and 2013, according to aerial surveys of the Chesapeake Bay Program.

But those increases were largely limited to a single species: widgeon grass, a plant known for wild fluctuations. At 60,000 acres total, submerged plants still didn’t come near a recent mini-peak in 2002, they’re a far cry from the ultimate goal of 185,000 acres across the Bay. What is holding them back? And—more importantly—how we can we help ensure the latest expansion isn’t just a blip?

More than 3,000 years ago, Native Americans dined on shellfish from the Chesapeake Bay, and the leftovers from those feasts are still benefiting modern-day forests.

Native Americans inhabited the Chesapeake Bay area more than 13,000 years before the first Europeans dropped anchor. During the Woodland period (3,200 to 400 years ago), they ate eastern oysters and threw the shells, along with animal bones, pottery and other shellfish remains, into trash piles called shell middens. Those piles enriched the soil with nutrients, promoting hot spots of native diversity along the Chesapeake shoreline.

“I just want to plant something that will grow in my yard. If a nonnative species grows better than a native, why shouldn’t I plant it?”

It’s a valid question, one that SERC postdoc Susan Cook-Patton remembers hearing from her father while still in high school. In the quest to preserve native plants, it’s become almost taboo to talk about the benefits of nonnatives. But not all nonnative plants are rampant invaders, and sometimes they could be good for gardens as a whole. Cook-Patton broke down the pros and cons of gardening with nonnative species at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s first evening lecture on April 15. Here are a few to consider when deciding what to put in your garden:

Jim Carlton tracked invasive species in the ocean for years when most scientists thought the sea was “invasion-proof.” (Anna Sawin)

There’s no official “father of marine invasions biology.” But if anyone could compete for the title, Jim Carlton, director of the Williams College – Mystic Seaport Program, would almost certainly top the list. More than 50 scientists from the U.S., Canada, Italy, Argentina and New Zealand voiced some version of that view, when they descended on the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center for a three-day symposium in April informally dubbed “Jimfest.”

Like so much in science, his career began by sheer accident. In 1962, 14-year-old Carlton stepped on a strange worm while picnicking with his family in Lake Merritt, a small lagoon near San Francisco Bay. A few weeks later he discovered the same worm in an exhibit at a local nature center. The label identified it as a tubeworm from the South Seas. “This thing in my backyard as it were, not far from my house, in this estuarine lagoon, how could this thing be from the South Seas?” Carlton remembered thinking. “So I got fascinated by that concept.”

In deer-populated forests, tastier plants can avoid being eaten if they are surrounded by less appealing plants. But with deer gone, diverse plots become weaker and plants are better off sticking to their own kind.

Sloth in Isla Galeta, near the Smithsonian’s marine station on the Panama Canal. (Kristen Larson/SERC)

March 10
Got up at o-2:30 to catch a shuttle to the airport, after singing a concert the night before and not getting to bed until 12:30. Finally arrived at our lodging in Panama about 10:30 p.m., bleary-eyed but happy to be back in this special place!

March 11
Our first day. Usually we start out a bit slowly, shopping for food, getting our IDs at Tupper, getting set up, but today we dive right in. We collect samples from the STRI dock in Naos and begin the process of reacquainting ourselves with the species in Panama. Warmer water means we are looking at a whole different suite of species than we see back in San Fran or Chesapeake. The lab is on an island situated just outside the canal on the Pacific side.

Imagine after settling down on a place to stay, your home picks up speed and moves without any forewarning, bringing you along with it to a new place. You get off to explore. It seems livable and similar to home, but a few adjustments will be necessary.

This story would be possible — if you were a mussel, a barnacle, or a myriad of other intertidal organisms. Once there, these new arrivals are sometimes able to escape their predators at home and thrive—often at the expense of native species, or the ecosystem as a whole.

Such is the dilemma of Mytilus galloprovincialis, a mussel from the Mediterranean. Mytilus galloprovincialis is native to southern Europe but has branched out to numerous non-native regions around the globe. It is the most prevalent non-native marine species in South Africa. There, it not only competitively displaced native species but also catalyzed the decline of swimming crabs and the increase of whelks.

Parents normally feel the need to provide well for their kids. For humans, that number of offspring is usually in the single digits, but a naked mole-rat queen can have as many as 900 pups in a lifetime spanning up to 30 years.

Naked mole-rats live their lives entirely underground in Africa, digging tunnels in a perpetual search for plant tubers to eat. These bizarre creatures are unlike nearly every other mammal on earth in that the burdens of reproduction and milk feeding of young are placed solely on a single queen and are not shared among the females of the colony.

While this system may work well for insects like bees where the young are fed by a horde of workers and nurses, scientists were perplexed as to how this system works for a mammal where one mother must produce milk for her very large brood.

A Chesapeake Bay NOAA mullet skiff. Note the motor near the bow. (SERC)

With its motor located near the bow (front) of the boat, the modern-day mullet skiff could have been a character in Lewis Carroll’s novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Similar to the unpunctual rabbit, vanishing cat and hookah smoking caterpillar, it seems illogical…or does it?

Commercial mullet fishing in 1955. (Monts de Oca, C. Morris courtesy of State Archives of Florida)

In the early 1900s, the mullet skiff was originally designed for use in the commercial mullet fishery of the south. Popular for its simple construction, flat-bottom dory style hull with vee entry, and rounded stern (back) design, the mullet skiff was ideal for operating in shallow waters while carrying heavy loads of fish. However, during Prohibition, entrepreneurs souped up their mullet skiffs with straight-8 engines (precursor V8s) to run rum from the Bahamas and Cuba to the states. Since then, many mullet skiffs have undergone less scandalous modifications and have evolved to have an outboard motor in a well near the bow.

Why place a motor here? For three important reasons: 1) It places the motor higher in the water for maneuvering in shallow water, 2) it leaves the stern (back) open to work a net, and 3) it eliminates the risk of net entanglement in the propeller. So, with “the wrong end in front,” the mullet skiff was the perfect choice for the near-shore predator study our field crew conducted this summer throughout the Chesapeake Bay.